On April 14th a group of social-entrepreneurs, academics, economists, bankers, philanthropists, business men and woman, system changers, lenders, borrowers and barter-ers will gather in Seattle for the 2008 unMoney Convergence to engage in an evolutionary conversation on money.
Topics covered will include micro-credit, slow money, local currencies, complementary currencies, time dollars, retail trade exchanges, LETS, state of the art transaction software and hardware...
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unMoney Convergence
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A great accompaniment to the lecture pamphlets
We have recently placed the audio files for a selection of the E. F. Schumacher Lectures online. Go to the Internet Archives to hear the words of inspiration as they were spoken.
After finding a lecture that piques your curiosity, search through our publications to see if... -
Slow Money
"Lowly, unpurposeful, and random as they may appear, sidewalk contacts are the small change from which a city's wealth of public life may grow."
--Jane Jacobs from "The Death and Life of Great American Cities."
One of the features of BerkShares, the local currency circulating in the Southern Berkshire region of Massachusetts, is that it fosters this wealth of sidewalk contacts.
Use of BerkShares, a paper currency, requires face to face... -
Kilowatt Hour Notes and Other Mediums of Exchange
In April of 1981 the E. F. Schumacher Society convened a conference called "Community Survival in the Age of Inflation." Schumacher President, Robert Swann addressed the conference on the theme "The Place of a Local Currency in a World Economy: Towards an Economy of Permanence." In his talk he laid out the steps for implementing a local currency denominated in kilowatt-hours of electricity produced regionally using small-scale technologies and renewable resources.
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Bringing Morals Back to the Table
Many of us are eating locally and organically produced food. From a modern economic perspective, where price is often the paramount consideration, these choices seem illogical.
What accounts for this shift, and does it have the possibility of expanding to all of our economic decisions?
At the end of his 1966 essay "Buddhist Economics," economist E.F. Schumacher asks, "whether modernization as currently practiced, without regard to religious and... -
50 Million Farmers
50 Million Farmers
As the world passes peak oil production we will again be "subject to the net-energy principle: it takes energy to get energy from the environment, and costs have to be subtracted from gross yields." Richard Heinberg, in his 2006 E. F. Schumacher Society lecture, says "we've been living on virtually free energy for the past two hundred years." He invites us to "imagine pushing our car twenty or thirty miles," the distance that...